Lexcen Is Not Surprised by Cup Setbacks

The man who helped win the America’s Cup for Australia is having no fun watching its departure.

Ben Lexcen, the designer who hatched the idea for Australia II’s winged keel, which turned the yachting world upside down in 1983, has looked on in pain as Kookaburra III has lost three consecutive races to Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes.

Now, with Conner needing only one more win to reclaim the prize Lexcen worked a decade and a half to get, the designer wonders whether it was worth the effort.

“Fifteen years of work for one night of fun,” he said sheepishly. “Never again.”

Lexcen, who designed the unsuccessful Australia III and IV for this Cup, said the big problem Kookaburra III is running up against is Conner. “He’s one of the best sailors in the world; that’s the bloody problem.”

Lexcen said Conner has the Kookaburra crew psyched out. “You watch them,” he said. “They’re all looking over their shoulders at Dennis’ boat. He’s got them intimidated.”

But Lexcen said he never expected the U.S. boat to have such an easy time. “I didn’t think they’d let them whip ‘em,” he said of the Kookaburra crew. “I thought they’d put up a struggle.”

Lexcen, who was aboard the spectator boat Sunbird Monday to watch the third race, said both inadequate technology and inexperience are catching up with the Australian effort.

“This is a farming country,” he said, a twinkle lighting his eye. “We dig the soil. We don’t make things here. When we go back to the dock, the Australian flags you see people waving were all made in Taiwan. This whole country is just a big, sunburned mine.”

He said the Conner camp’s use of big-time defense contractors like SAIC, Boeing and Grumman gave them access to technological information for boat design the Australians couldn’t match.

And he said inexperience was the final failing of the Australian effort.

Kookaburra III skipper Iain Murray is “very good,” he said. “He’s brilliant. But he just hasn’t had the experience. No one on the boat has ever been in the America’s Cup before.”

By contrast, Australia II’s team had been in “heaps of America’s Cups before we won,” said Lexcen, who designed boats for Alan Bond in 1974, ’77 and ’80 before the successful effort in ’83.

Over in the Conner camp, Rolex watches were being awarded Monday night to all crew members for making it to the Cup final, and tactician Tom Whidden noted afterward that several in the crew were accepting their second, third and even fourth watches.

“It struck me that we have an awful lot of experience in our group,” said Whidden, who is in his third Cup.

Experience shows up in little things, Lexcen said, such as the Kookaburra crew’s decision to try a complicated spinnaker set at the first mark of Monday’s race, which ended up putting them on the wrong side of the course in choppy water churned up by the spectator fleet.

Stars & Stripes, just 15 seconds ahead before the mistake, made a simpler set to the favored side of the course, built a six-length lead out of a three-length lead and Kookaburra never came close again.

The Kookaburra crew “was looking at a computer that says, ‘Go here,’ ” Lexcen said. “Conner just looks at the course and says, ‘It’s better over here.’ ”

For his part, Lexcen says he’s through drawing 12 meters. “I’m getting too old to go around in slow boats,” he said. “If these were big catamarans out here, we’d be around the course in half the time.

“Twenty years from now,” said Lexcen, who is usually about that far ahead of his time, “the only boats with ballast (lead keels) in them will be cruisers.

“What’s the point in putting lead in a racing boat?” Lexcen asked. “It’s like saying, ‘Here’s a nice Formula One racing car. Now let’s put 3,000 pounds of concrete in it and go racing.’ ”